🚀 go-pugleaf

David Baggett writes:
>
>Yes, shareware is a complete and utter joke.  It's a delusion that
>naive programmers (or very lucky ones) get sucked into.  Eventually
>we learn how silly it all is.  Honestly, why should we expect people
>to pay for something they already have anyway?  It's just insane to
>think this system would work on a grand scale.

No, it *does* work.  But your chances of success are about the same
are writing your first novel, sending it off to a publisher, and having 
it become a runaway best seller.  By "success" I mean enough money
to comfortably live off of so you can develop more software.  I
have talked to several programmers who, at the peak of their success,
were pulling in $300 a month in registrations.  That sounds
impressive, but just try to live on $3600 a year.  Even triple
that wouldn't be all that great.

The big shareware success stories (in the IBM world, mostly) are
run by people who look at what they are doing as a full-time
business.  They don't simply upload a program to various ftp
sites and bbs'es and wait for results, they advertise, make
distribution deals, have overseas distributors, get 800 numbers
and credit card merchant status, hire full-time telephone
operators, use professional artists--and most importantly, use
shareware as a hook to get people buying commercial products.
In the purest sense, this is no longer shareware.

--
James Hague   
exuhag@exu.ericsson.se